The present invention provides a method for determining a bit boundary of a repetition-coded signal, and more particularly, a method for increasing efficiency of extracting information from the repetition-coded signal especially for low C/N use by recording each sensed sign change of the repetition-coded signal with a weighting function.
In positioning systems, such as a global positioning system (GPS), a positioning receiver detects positions based on radio waves and time differences between satellites and itself, or a triangular positioning theorem, so that the positioning receiver requires four satellite signals to calculate latitude and altitude. In the GPS system, each satellite transmits a spread spectrum modulated signal that is modulated with a code, C/A (coarse/acquisition) or P (precision) code, which is individual for each satellite. Thus, the positioning receiver can distinguish signals transmitted by different satellites from each other by using a reference code corresponding to the satellite code generated locally in the positioning receiver.
In poor signal conditions, a signal transmitted by a satellite is strongly attenuated when arriving at the positioning receiver because of climatic conditions or obstacles, such as buildings and surrounding grounds in the routing of the signal. Also, the signal can travel to the positioning receiver through a plurality of different routes, which causes so-called multipath propagation and aggravates the synchronizing of the positioning receiver with a wished signal because the transmitted signal arrives at the receiver through different routings. Due to this multipath propagation, the same signal is received as several signals with different phases.
In the poor signal conditions, position and time uncertainties are large, and the C/A-code epoch ambiguity results in the lack of knowledge of data bit timing. Thus, bit synchronization is required, and there are a number of techniques available to achieve bit synchronization by detecting the moment of change for the bit (boundary). The detection of bit boundary is necessary in order to detect navigation data, to use coherent integration in the tracking loop, and to calculate pseudo ranges.
For example, a histogram approach of the prior art breaks an assumed data bit period (20 ms) into 20 C/A-code 1-ms epoch periods and senses sign changes between successive epochs. For each sensed sign change, a corresponding histogram cell count is incremented until a count in one specific cell exceeds the other 19 bins by a predetermined amount. The procedure of the histogram approach is as follows. A cell counter is arbitrarily set and runs from 1 to 20. Each sensed sign change is recorded by adding 1 to a histogram cell corresponding to the cell counter. The procedure continues until one of the following occurs: (a) two cell counts exceed a first threshold, (b) loss of lock, and (c) one cell count exceeds a second threshold. If (a) occurs, bit synchronization fails because of low C/N or lack of bit sign transitions, and bit synchronization is reinitialized. If (b) occurs, lock is reestablished. If (c) occurs, bit synchronization is successful, and the C/A-code epoch count is reset to the correct value.
According to the prior art histogram approach, a receiver can find out a bit boundary if one cell count exceeds the second threshold. However, when noise power is high or signal quality is poor, using the histogram approach makes it easy to misjudge the bit boundary. For example, please refer to FIG. 1 and FIG. 2. FIG. 1 illustrates a schematic diagram of correlation accumulation values versus epochs in case that signal quality is poor, while FIG. 2 illustrates a histogram corresponding to FIG. 1 according to the prior art histogram approach. Since signal quality is poor, the histogram in FIG. 2 shows a position of 1 to be the position of the bit transition, which is 10 in reality.
In short, the prior art histogram approach is not suitable for low C/N use.